The Ministry is Primarily Dedicated to Documenting Current Complaints in the British and World Press Regarding Mr Dick Van Dyke's Poor Attempt at a Cockney Accent in the Motion Picture Mary Poppins Half a Century Ago.

And although the term Cockney dates back to the time of Chaucer, it is unlikely that the accent so memorably imitated by Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins has many similarities with the dialect spoken by Londoners in the 1400s.

Cockney has starred in famous TV and film productions. It is still the lingua franca of top-rated soap EastEnders, made a mangled appearance on the lips of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins and is occasionally used by Bart Simpson of The Simpsons to this day.

Had the archive been around at the time, we might have been spared the vocal grotesqueries of Dick Van Dyke and Sean Connery, who topped Empire magazine's poll of the worst accents in cinema history for their work on, respectively, Mary Poppins (1964) and The Untouchables (1987). ''We get mail of thanks from many actors who are working with scripts that require obscure speech accents,'' Weinberger says.

In a 2002 interview with famed theatre critic Michael Billington, (Alan) Ayckbourn said, "When I started out, there were serious plays where the lighting was desperately dark and the tempo turgid, and comic plays where madness prevailed and everyone talked like Dick Van Dyke on speed. What I've tried to do is bring these elements together, which is a bit like dancing on the edge of a razor blade."

The Hell? I think the author is confusing Dick Van Dyke with Audrey Hepburn...

If accounts of Brits travelling to the States (as well as my own experiences when I visit) are to be believed, your average American still holds as gospel the notion that Britain is populated by fish-and-chip eating, binge-drinking football-hooligans with bad teeth who talk like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins, even when they are chatting up the Queen. And they’re all homosexuals. Except for Hugh Grant, and we’re not really sure about him.